Longtime TNT broadcaster Craig Sager won the Atlanta Sports Awards Community Spirit Award on Thursday night.
Hawks television broadcaster Bob Rathbun presented the award.
Sager’s son and daughter, Craig Sager II and Kacy Sager accepted the award.
The Sager’s emphasized in their speeches that their father wasn’t born in Atlanta, but fully became an “ATLien” during his time in the city.
“He felt right at home in a city that always had something big going on,” Kacy Sager said. My dad said he always rooted for the home team because it was a better story. I can’t think of a better setting for my dad to write his story as a hometown hero than Atlanta.”
“I used to be so determined to find the source of my dad’s spirit,” Craig Sager II said. “No matter how much fun I was having, I always knew he was somewhere having more fun than me. He was always up somehow. His spirit can be traced back to two things – one, his gratitude, and two, Ernie Banks. Banks was everything to him. The more he watched him play, the more his admiration came. It became obvious to him Banks was more than a great player, he was a great human. Ernie loved life. He said, I didn’t want to just be Ernie Banks the player, I wanted to be Ernie Banks the person. My dad’s spirit was radiated from his gratitude.”
At the end of his speech, Craig Sager II recited a moving poem that his father wrote on the back of a picture he took of sprinter Michael Johnson at the 1996 Olympics. The message of the poem was that the city of Atlanta passed the test of the Olympics.
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